Depressed and anxious at times, certainly, and a master grudge-holder, but never much of a fighter or a yeller. Their anger is hard for me to understand. I worry about what this hair-trigger fury will look like when he is no longer an adorable five-year-old, when I am no longer able to hold him down. Lately, my younger son’s violent and unpredictable outbursts have had us scrambling from teachers to therapists to allergists to behaviorists, and back again. I had spent the whole day refereeing fights between them. What my friends seem to often call “boys.” As in, boys will be boys. What the school district calls special needs. What the parenting books call challenging, or high needs. Even on their best days, my boys are an extreme iteration of what my mother’s generation would have called wild. Closing my eyes for a moment, I listened to the comforting, sweet sound of the their breath. I crawled into my bed, fully clothed, next to my sleeping boys, ages five and nine, and pulled my laptop off the nightstand. As I leaned back against a counter and took a sip, for no discernable reason I thought of Nick - an unexpected emotional freight train barreling down a long-deserted track. Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of WomenĪ few weeks ago, on an ordinary Wednesday night, I finished drying the dinner dishes in the husband-out-of-town-kids-in-bed blissful quiet, and poured myself a glass of pinot grigio.
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